AcademicX

I will also probably be attending Columbia next fall. What do people think about Columbia housing? It seems the easy way out of the stress of apartment hunting in NYC. EDIT: Philosophy PhD!

Someone posted in the waitlist thread that Columbia had 6 funded positions for 319 applicants this year. That's a 1.9% acceptance rate.

Can anyone share their experience with Columbia housing? The rooms seem to be cheap and I wouldn't have to go through the seemingly stressful process of apartment hunting. For the dorm apartments, do they all have communal kitchens? I want to be able to cook to keep my food costs low. Is this housing only for graduate students or would there be undergrads as well? Is it like your average college dorm? Because if it is, I wouldn't mind just getting what I've getting for the past 4 years and save some money. Thanks in advance.

Yeah, it seems a little weird based on how acceptances have been released in past years. Let's wait to see more posts. I hope you get an e-mail soon and can confirm this! Good luck!

I am going to college in the US, but I am an international student. At least for the schools I applied to, the funding situation is the same as for domestic students. Now, I don't know if there are any extra taxes we would have to pay on the fellowship money as international students. Moreover, I know for sure that Penn State (and probably most schools) are looking to diversify their student body given that philosophy is still predominantly a white-male field (of course, I don't want to assume that you are a person of color or a woman). Fun fact: I noticed that at least 4 out of the 6 Columbia admits this year were international students (with or without a degree from a US undergraduate institution).

Congrats to the Princeton and Rutger acceptances!

I just declined my offers from Emory and Fordham. Hope this helps people in this forum. Good luck to everyone!

Hi guys, Could anyone tell me more about how the advisor/student relationship works in grad school? Do students usually choose an advisor after finishing the MA requirements (mostly classes)? Is the advisor the same as the dissertation supervisor? Do you pretty much work only with her/him once you start working on the dissertation? I think that dissertations committees usually have two other members, right? Any other insights about how this works? Thanks in advance!

I just took myself off the DePaul waitlist. I will be also declining Fordham's offer soon. Hope this helps those that are in the waitlist(s). While it was easy to decline a spot in a waitlist, I find it a lot harder to write to Fordham and tell them I will decline their offer of admission. Any advise on how to decline an offer in a nice way?

I think the email was a personal one. At least, it was addressed to me by first name. Since I do not share Prof. Collins' philosophical interests, I think he e-mailed me because he is the director of Graduate Admissions.

Thanks guys! I can't even described how happy I am It was through an email from John Collins.

Columbia acceptance here!!! Hell yeah!!

What is your evidence for these claims? I don't mean to be critical; just trying to keep our arguments substantiated. It also seems unfair to privilege TT positions at top-ranked research universities (assuming you're talking about PGR rankings) over other TT positions. It's clear that top-Leiter-ranked programs will seek to hire from other top-Leiter ranked programs because they specialize in the same things (e.g. departments that privilege philosophy of mind and phil science are going to hire people from top-Leiter programs; they wouldn't find anyone with that AOS at continental-oriented schools). Moreover, there are fewer continental positions that analytic ones (especially in leiter-ranked programs), so it makes sense that PhDs with an AOS in continental philosophy have a harder time finding a TT job. But this is more a product of the state of the philosophy profession in the US than of the graduate programs' quality.

I take back the comparison between Dr. Leiter and Vineyard. I did not mean to imply that Leiter was a misogynistic jerk or anything like that. My criticism of his methodology concerning continental philosophy remains, however. As to this, I take your point. However, I am not sure if this proves that non-ranked departments will be detrimental in your chances of getting a TT position.

Are you the reincarnation of Leiter? If so, given your comments regarding the climate for women in philosophy, rape culture and this unnecessary personal attack, you're on a good track. After reading that link, all I can say is that, PGR rankings only account for over 50% of TT placement. And that only if we choose to take out the 6 outliers. Now, taking 6 statistics out of a data set of 50 is a very objectionable choice. If we included the outliers, the explanatory force of PGR ranking would drop from 57% to 24% for the 7-year GAP regression.

From http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/12/2011-pgr-20th-c-cp-board.html#comments (see the first comment by "Brian") " [...]The one point I do agree with you on is that none of these people are interested in Irigaray, Kristeva, Badiou et al. (some are interested in Deleuze). But I think anyone interested mainly in those figures should probably not be going to a philosophy department anyway for a PhD." Leiter often engages in blog bickering (if not verbal abuse, see the first comment here http://gonepublic.net/2014/02/11/pgr-participation-drops-39/) with people who disagree with him, and he uses Brian as his username. As much as I really wanted to go to UChicago, I am kind of glad that my chances of ever talking to him are lower now.

I wish i could give you ten upvotes! I'll come back tomorrow and see if i can give you an extra one lol.

After reading the discussion in the Acceptance thread, I decided to start a thread about the PGR rankings. Given my interests, it is natural that the questions that I would like to discuss are related to the relevance of Leiter's rankings to people who want to pursue work in continental philosophy. For that reason, I would like people to attempt to answer the original questions of this post first. With that said, I think that this should be a space where everyone can talk about all aspects of the PGR rankings freely. I don't really have an opinion about the PGR rankings as a whole. However, I've noticed that, while most people here seem to agree that the overall rankings are of little use (e.g., because they lump many subfields together and do not reflect the strength of a given department regarding the student's particular interests), the same people always talk about schools in terms top-20 or top-10 (which perpetuates the idea that the overall rankings are relevant). Like perpetuavix made clear, there is no meaningful correlation between overall PGR rankings and TT placements (the Rsquared values of a linear regression is .17-.18). This statistics already account for the time interval between the year of the ranking and the year the students enter the job market. While some have correctly argued that other positions (post-doc, adjunct, lecturer) should also be accounted for, I believe that most of us are shooting for TT positions (at least that was the main argument in favor of following the PGR rankings in the first place). Besides these thoughts about the rankings as a whole, I also have concerns about the rankings' relevance for students who want to pursue work in continental philosophy. The first thing that comes to mind, is the Leiter's obvious bias against continental philosophy (and particularly, the work associated with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, a.k.a. SPEP). If anyone disagrees with this statement, I will gladly take the time to quote the several times that Leiter made his bias explicit (and, trust me, Dr. Leiter is a very outspoken person in the internet, so this is no difficult work). Given my first claim, it is clear that schools that have more people working in continental philosophy (and particularly, those departments associated with SPEP) will have lower rankings because that is not the kind of philosophy that counts for Leiter. Obviously, Leiter doesn't create the rankings on his own (or at least, not anymore. See http://rgheck.frege.org/philosophy/aboutpgr.php). Even then, his choice of evaluators for 19th and 20th century continental philosophy doesn't include a single member of SPEP (the 2nd largest philosophical organization in the US and, in spite of Leiter's opinion, a major player in the field of continental philosophy). Moreover, as this blog shows (http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/12/2011-pgr-20th-c-cp-board.html#comments), the choice of evaluators privileges the German tradition (mainly German idealism), with only a few people who specialize in contemporary French philosophy. There are many more evaluators who have French philosophy as a secondary interest, but they barely publish anything on these "interests" (out of 22 evaluators with such AOI, there are only 7 articles published by 5 individuals). Leiter's response (also in the same blog) is that the evaluators need not be experts in the field in order to evaluate it. You may disagree with me, but I think that the whole point of the PGR rankings was to give "expert advise" about the quality of philosophy departments in particular areas. Like Professor McAfee argues here (http://gonepublic.net/2011/11/15/the-favorites-favorites-another-round-of-pgr-rankings-of-continental-philosophy/), " t’s hard enough for someone who specializes in a field to keep abreast — in addition to his or her own work — to all the work that all the other people in their field are doing year by year, especially if given a list of 90 programs to evaluate." For that reason, I don't think that even the specialty rankings are useful for students of continental philosophy (especially those whose primary interest is not German idealism). It's funny how Leiter claims that Kant is a continental figure, while he considers that Kristeva and Badiou wouldn't be taught in any serious philosophy department (see links above). Finally, I would like to share again the link that Monadology posted in a different thread. http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2013/10/02/Will-I-get-a-Job-Graduate-School-Philosophy-Placement-Records.aspx I am not sure what the criticisms of this study are, so I would love to hear about them. I find it really usuful, if not a little deceiving because programs like Penn State get a .96 ratio of current TT positions because the data is drawn from a "summary of placements", which most probably excludes those who were unable to secure such positions. That said, the study shows that a lot of SPEPy departments have healthy placement records (e.g. Boston College has 82%, Stony Brook 75% and Villanova 71% TT placement record with all their data available for the study) Well this is all for now. I am sorry if this post is too long and of tangential interest to the analytically oriented in this forum.

Edit_Undo, on 25 Feb 2014 - 11:31 PM, said: Ian, I also want to thank you for your blog; it's been really helpful. I wish you had included some of the top schools for continental philosophy, but I totally understand the choice of only working with Leiter's top 50.

can we edit our entries after we have already submitted them?

I'm visiting Vanderbilt, Penn State and Emory (in that order) starting two weeks from now. Anyone else going there?

does anyone NOT get in the MAPH?

Official rejection from Stony Brook. I saw that one coming...

I thought this might be relevant. It is Brown's Richard Heck critique of Leiter's ranking. http://rgheck.frege.org/philosophy/aboutpgr.php

It is not true that the PGR doesn't claim to be relevant for continental philosophy. Leiter also has rankings for many specialties in philosophy, including 19th and 20th century continental philosophy. http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/breakdown/breakdown29.asp At first glance, it is evident that this rankings are biased towards overall-analytic departments with a couple of professors doing continental philosophy, rather than programs that specialize in continental philosophy (except maybe Chicago that has several people working in continental. One wonders why Chicago is only ranked 20 in the overall PGR). On the contrary, top 'SPEP' schools whose specialty is continental philosophy are barely considered even in these specialty rankings. I don't know about the others, but I don't think that a department in which my AOI is underrepresented can be considered a great fit. Is as if Leiter recommended a student interested in philosophy of mind to go to a SPEP school because they have 2 faculty members working on that topic. All the while, that student can benefit from taking graduate courses in Derrida, existentialism and the early Frankfurt School.